Quotes from Ray Kurzweil

One view is that philosophy is a kind of halfway house for questions that have not yet yielded to the scientific method.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.

GEORGE 2048: We like to think of it as one civilization.

Predicting the future is actually the primary reason that we have a brain.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception. —Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

This, then, was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas.

the R&D department can't get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding—yet it is remarkably similar to our brain.

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. —LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003

I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.

If the teacher is correct only 60 percent of the time, the student neural net will still learn its lessons with an accuracy approaching 100 percent.

inflammation in the body) is a very healthy 0.01, and all of my other indexes (for heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions) are at ideal levels.

Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —HUSTON SMITH16

If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either.

electron-beam lithography

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain).

perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (assumed at ten billion human brains for ten thousand years) in ten microseconds.64 If we examine the "Exponential Growth of Computing" chart (p. 70), we see that this amount of computing is estimated to be available for one thousand dollars by 2080.

Hoewel we de illusie hebben dat we beelden met hoge resolutie ontvangen van onze ogen, stuurt de oogzenuw slechts contouren en aanwijzingen over interessante punten in ons blikveld naar het brein. We 'hallucineren' eigenlijk de wereld vanuit ons corticale geheugen.